Sea of Tranquility(9)

“Wait, literally across the street?”

“Yeah, the buildings face each other. The doormen at both addresses probably knew for years.”

“How could she not know?” Mirella asked, and just like that the past had swallowed her whole and she was talking about Vincent.

“A man who works long hours can hide anything,” Louisa said. She was still talking about her aunt, and hadn’t noticed that Mirella was elsewhere. “Lucky for you I don’t work.”

“Lucky for me,” Mirella echoed, and kissed Louisa’s hand. “What a crazy story.”

“It’s the across-the-street thing that gets me,” Louisa said. “That geography was brazen.”

“I can’t decide if it’s very lazy or very efficient.” Mirella was pretending to still be there in the restaurant with Louisa, eating noodles, but she was far away. Vincent had sworn she hadn’t known about her husband’s crimes, in deleted voicemails and in a deposition.

“Mirella.” Louisa’s hand rested gently on Mirella’s wrist. “Come back.”

Mirella sighed, and set down her chopsticks.

“Did I ever tell you about my friend Vincent?”

“The wife of the Ponzi scheme guy?”

“Yeah. That story about your aunt made me think of her. Did I tell you I saw her once, after Faisal died?”

Louisa’s eyes widened. “No.”

“It was a little over a year after his death, so March or April of 2010. I went into a bar with some friends, and Vincent was the bartender.”

“Oh my god. What did you say to her?”

“Nothing,” Mirella said.

She hadn’t recognized her at first. In the days of money, Vincent had had long wavy hair like all the other trophy wives, but in the bar her hair was cut very short, and she wore glasses and no makeup. In the moment the disguise had struck Mirella as vindication—of course you’re trying to hide, you monster—but now a certain ambiguity had entered the scene: a reasonable alternate explanation for the short hair/glasses/no makeup was that one or another of her husband’s defrauded investors could walk in at any moment. Manhattan was lousy with defrauded investors in those days.

“I pretended not to know her,” she said now, to Louisa. “As revenge, I guess. It wasn’t my best moment. She always said she didn’t know what Jonathan had been doing, but I just thought, Of course you knew. How could you possibly not have known. You knew and you let Faisal lose everything and now he’s dead. That was all I could think about in those days.”

Louisa nodded. “Stands to reason that she’d know,” she said.

“But what if she didn’t?”

“Is it plausible that she didn’t know?” Louisa asked.

“I didn’t think so, at the time. But you’re telling me this story about your poor Aunt Jacquie, and, well, if you can hide a five-year-old, you can hide a Ponzi scheme.”

Louisa held Mirella’s hands across the table. “You should talk to her.”

“I have no idea how to find her.”

“It’s 2019,” Louisa said. “No one’s invisible.”

But Vincent was. In those days Mirella was working as a receptionist at a high-end tile showroom near Union Square. It was the kind of place that required few customers, because when people spent money here, they spent tens of thousands of dollars. The morning after her dinner with Louisa, whiling away a silent hour behind a reception desk the size of a car, Mirella searched for Vincent. She tried Vincent’s husband’s surname first. A search for “Vincent Alkaitis” produced old society photos, some with Mirella in them—parties, galas, etc.—and also pages of Vincent at her husband’s sentencing hearing, blank-faced, in a gray suit, and absolutely nothing else. The most recent images were from 2011. “Vincent Smith” turned up dozens of different people, mostly men, none of them the Vincent she was looking for. She couldn’t find Vincent on social media, or anywhere else.

She leaned back in her chair, frustrated. High over her desk, a light was buzzing. Mirella wore a great deal of makeup at work, and when she was tired in the afternoons, sometimes her face felt heavy. Out on the white-tiled prairie of the sales floor, a lone sales rep was walking a customer through every conceivable color of the company’s signature composite material, which looked like stone but wasn’t.

Vincent’s parents were long dead, but she’d had a brother. Dredging up the brother’s name required a deep dive into memory, which was a place Mirella generally tried to avoid. She glanced at the door to make sure no customers were approaching, then closed her eyes, took two deep breaths, and typed “Paul Smith + composer” into Google.

This was how she found herself at the Brooklyn Academy of Music four months later, waiting outside the stage door for Paul James Smith. She’d been hoping he could tell her how to find Vincent. But now Vincent was dead, apparently, which meant it was going to be a very different conversation. The stage door was on a quiet residential street. Mirella paced while she waited, not far, just a few feet in either direction. It was late January but unseasonably warm, well above freezing. Only one other person waited with her: a man of about her own age, mid-thirties, in jeans and a nondescript blazer. His clothes were too big. He nodded to her, she nodded back, and they settled into an awkward wait. Some time passed. A couple of staffers left without looking at them.